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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

> Le Maire also welcomed a decision by France’s financial markets authority to ban short-selling during trading on Tuesday on 92 French stocks and said the measure could be extended up to a month if necessary.

This is peak retardation by people who do not understand how the economy/markets work. French companies have lost lots of their competitiveness due unions, legal barriers, high taxes, etc... A recession/crisis would force these companies either to shutdown or restructure making them stronger in the future and letting the economy run on its own.

If the government has failed to pass previous reforms, why would they think they'll successfully save these companies?

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What would France stand to gain if these companhias are forced to shut down due to a "force of nature" event, or worse be bought out by a foreign investor due to the restructuring you're advocating?

I'm all for market efficiency, but the real world works differently than text books.

I generally agree, and I'm very much in favor of market based economies. There is nothing wrong with France doing what is necessary toward production, during such an extreme event.

The US extending massive credit to businesses, bailing out the airlines (coming), bailing out Boeing (coming), and the 407 other bailouts yet to come, are all variations of immense state intervention into the economy, due to a force of nature event. They're also necessary, as the alternative is a much harder reboot with dramatically more damage. You can let a few companies fail in a normal recession, if we let everything go here, the unnecessary economic damage will be measured in the $10 trillion type range. And some of it we may never get back (eg letting Boeing fall down now, they might never get back up, given China is absolutely coming online in the next 10-20 years with competitive planes).

> What would France stand to gain if these companhias are forced to shut down due to a "force of nature" event, or worse be bought out by a foreign investor due to the restructuring you're advocating?

The economy restructures itself to be more resilient to such events? The coronavirus is not even close to the smallpox which has been circulating for much of humans history. Companies/Economy should be able to withstand such events.

> The economy restructures itself to be more resilient to such events?

That's the kind of stuff that only exists in textbooks. In the real world you just get important parts of your economy be controlled by foreign corporations.

> The coronavirus is not even close to the smallpox

That's entirely irrelevant. We're talking about a disruptive event to an economy. It makes absolutely no difference if you can imagine worse events or diseases if we're discussing stuff regarding the economy.

An American example is: A company outsourced all its production over the last few years to China. With the global pandemic production of the goods in China came to a halt. The company experiences a crash due to their inability to get the goods from China. In its place competitors who kept production domestic but who had higher production costs would now rise to the top. If you "bail out" every bad company you distort the market completely and reward non-efficient behavior.

But the competitors who kept production domestic went out of business several decades ago. So where does that leave us in practice?

Not all of the domestic businesses?

You need to ensure they now get their reward for that choice, otherwise you're rewarding taking the wrong decisions (for resilience) and then you're paying more to have a less optimal system. In a way, the companies making essentials that aren't struggling right now are the ones you should be supporting .. but we have to address the crises at hand first.

Le maire is a complete idiot who doesn't understand markets or economy, he simply doesn't have received the education for such.

Bruno Le Maire is the current minister of economy of a G8 country, a post he holds after a career in which he has been minister of agriculture, secretary of state for European Affairs and chief of staff of the prime minister. I will surmise than he has both an idea and hand on experience with how a market based economy works.

You might argue that he is mostly a good politican but considering it's pretty hard to do better as a student in France (ENS, received first at aggregation, ENA), I might hazard that he is probably not a complete idiot either.

And I'm telling you that despite completely disagreeing with the political opinion of the man.

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